Talking of dialogue...

[John Dean]

As is the case with most, probably all, authors from time to time, I recently reached an impasse with my writing. Work on the new DCI Jack Harris crime novel had been going well and I knew what I wanted to happen in chapter twelve but, for some reason, found myself struggling to bring it all together.

As so often, the answer was provided by my characters, specifically on this occasion, their dialogue. By exploring the idea for the chapter through the energy that was supplied by the words that they spoke I discovered new impetus and raced onto chapter thirteen.

If you are a writer, it is worth recalling some of the elements that make dialogue work. To start with, it is important to remember that dialogue is crucial to any novel. Good dialogue lifts a story, bad dialogue wrecks it. However, writing dialogue isn’t about replicating a real-life conversation. It’s about giving an impression of it. The role of the writer is to select what’s important.

There are some things to bear in mind in order to get dialogue right:

In real life we repeat ourselves. Not so in fictional dialogue. Yes, it must sound like real people speaking but without the elements of conversation that slow it down. The difference between dialogue in life and dialogue in stories is that in stories you need to cut day-to-day conversation that is extraneous. Instead, focus on the core of each conversation. What does it show about your characters and what’s happening in the story?

We tend to talk in short, sharp snaps of dialogue so aim to get rid of most of the social niceties. Don’t remove them completely because you still want conversations to sound natural, but remember that dialogue in novels needs to cut to the chase a lot quicker than in real-life. It may well ‘look like rain’ but do we need half a page to say it?

We assume a lot. If you are talking about a relative, we tend not to say ‘How’s your sister, Barbara?’ We tend to say ‘How’s your sister?’ If there’s more than one sister we tend to say ‘How’s Barbara?’ Getting it wrong can give such a bad impression of you as a writer. There’s a line in one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies when Jack Sparrow asks the character played by Jennifer Lopez ‘how’s your father, Blackbeard?’ Both characters know that Blackbeard is the father and as a result the impression is of a writer shoehorning a bit of plot information in without thinking how natural or otherwise it sounds.

Good writers do not cram detail into dialogue. We say ‘I’ll meet you by the bus stop’. Not ‘I’ll meet you by the bus stop on Green Road, the blue one, by the corner shop, opposite the park’.

Show characters’ surrounds while they talk. Make them do things, make the tea, hang up the washing etc, all of which gives the conversation context and injects energy.

Give the characters conflicting goals. One of them wants one thing, the other something else. It doesn’t need to end in a shouting match but the underlying tension will keep the reader turning those pages.

Dialogue should drive the story forward. Every line should do a job. Ask yourself, will the story still make sense if a passage of dialogue is removed? If so, hit delete.

Don’t have characters all sounding the same – give them distinct voices.

Tackle these challenges and your dialogue will work.

If you wish to find out more about my online courses on general fiction and crime fiction, feel free to email me at [e-mail]